Like the original commenter, everyone at my company really likes all the folks at Cockroach Labs. It's been a pleasure working with them.
We're currently in discussion with them to see if we can resolve this licensing change to our satisfaction. If not, we'll do the obvious (use a different database) as you said.
Even though some people would call me that, I've always hated that term/ideology. I wish companies would shift their mindset to, "a candidate that adds to our diversity". E.g. my current employer has done a really good job at not discriminating too much against women and attracting women, so we're well above industry average in our woman:NB:man ratio so it's more representative of the source population. We haven't done as well with regard to racial and age non-discrimination. As we do better in either of those two categories, the definition of "a candidate that adds to our diversity" will change.
> We have already selected a male candidate for the internship so it'd be best if the next one was a woman
This is both true and legal (though I wish it included NBs as well). The more candidates you select from a given demographic, the probability increases that your organization is participating in a discriminatory system. If it makes it more palatable, reword it in your head by tacking on at the end, "... so we can be somewhat reassured we're not contributing to gender discrimination."
> Your no-hire vote should have more justification since the candidate is a woman
Studies have shown even women evaluate women more harshly than they evaluate men. Extra justification is warranteed when gender is known or implied and the reviewer is likely to have unconscious bias. That's why better hiring systems try to hide gender on the initial application, so you can be reasonably reassured gender is not a factor. (That said, there are a lot of gender implications on many applications, so it can be tough to hide gender completely).
> The reality is that we need a strong legal ruling against these type of things
Alternatively, guaranteed job placement into one's chosen profession would help everyone indiscriminately. Trying to ban anti-discrimination efforts serves only status quo biases.
> too "problematic" to bring this up and the risk for retaliation is insanely high
I agree this is a risk. Surely there are some people who "bring this up" in a bigoted way and are rightfully fired, but I suspect there's a number of people who, with a gentle reframing, can see how their views are problematic and can learn the knowledge gaps that caused them to come to the wrong conclusion. From the company's perspective, they're doing anti-discrimination work, and an employee objection sounds like they're pro-discrimination. It's a bilateral failure to communicate in an at-will employment relationship.
> > We have already selected a male candidate for the internship so it'd be best if the next one was a woman
> This is both true and legal
Absolutely not. Using any protected class (race, gender, religion, disability, etc.) in hiring decisions is illegal unless this is a bona fide occupational qualification [1]. You can deliberately hire a Black person to play Frederick Douglass in a move. You cannot deliberately hire or favor someone on the basis of race or gender for software development jobs. This example above is textbook illegal discrimination: "I don't want to select $protected_class_X, it'd be best of the next one was $protected_class_Y". The fact that the previous hire belonged to $protected_class_X does not in any way make it legal to discriminate on the next hire.
Companies do this, but they're breaking the law and hoping they aren't going to be held accountable. And as per TFA, now that they're realizing that people aren't as supportive of racial and gender discrimination as they thought these policies are being rolled back.
> That's why better hiring systems try to hide gender on the initial application, so you can be reasonably reassured gender is not a factor.
Interestingly, all the DEI staff I've encountered have resoundingly shut down calls to anonymize applications. It puzzled me at first until I attended a career fair and recruiters instructed us to mark female URM candidates with two stars, non-URM women and URM men with one star, and Asian men with "ND". Which I later learned stood for "negative diversity". I poked around the onboarding docs recruiters had, and they linked to census data on majority-female and majority-URM names. Recruiters were being given specific percentage quotas for women and URM hires. Of course they don't want anonymization. It all makes sense when you realize DEI isn't an anti-discrimination effort, they are actively carrying out discrimination.
> E.g. my current employer has done a really good job at not discriminating too much against women and attracting women, so we're well above industry average in our woman:NB:man
This really struck me as an odd thing to say. You admit that women are overrepresented, and elsewhere in your comment you seem to think that discrimination favoring women is legal. Yet you assume that the overrepresentation of women is evidence that your company isn't discriminatory.
Imagine someone wrote this: "Our company is good at avoiding anti-male discrimination, so we're well above industry average in our men:women ratio." And now imagine that the same person writes that refusing to hire a woman for an internship is legal if the previous intern hire was a woman. Do you think this person's company is non-discriminatory?
The evidence in tech company hiring actually shows women are favored over men [2], so maybe don't assume that your company's overrepresentation of women is because other companies are discriminating against women and yours is non-biased.
The other reason they hate anonymous packets is that whenever that's been implemented by them thinking the result would be more women, the result is a swing towards hiring white men. Because it turned out they were already engaging in discrimination without admitting to it or being aware of it. Word got around and now they know what the outcome would be.
Right. And they're saying it would be best if they weren't accidentally doing that.
> DEI isn't an anti-discrimination effort, they are actively carrying out discrimination
Why do you think this? All efforts I've seen have been to correct for the discrimination currently occurring in the system.
> You admit that women are overrepresented
I don't. We're still substantially less than 50% of engineering.
> The evidence in tech company hiring actually shows women are favored over men
If this were true, men would be the minority. Women like money just as much as men do, and would leverage that non-existent favoritism to get those high paying jobs.
The fundamental mistake at the root of your argument is the assumption that the demographics of a job should represent the demographics of the total population, as opposed to the demographics of the qualified applicant pool.
> Right. And they're saying it would be best if they weren't accidentally doing that.
"We have already selected a male candidate for the internship so it'd be best if the next one was a woman" This is deliberately engaging in discrimination on the basis of gender. The fact that the previous hire was a man does not make it legal to use gender as a factor in hiring the next candidate, this is the gambler's fallacy [1]. I'm truly baffled as to how you think this is preventing discrimination by explicitly voicing preference for a protected class.
Your line of thinking amounts to, "we should intentially discriminate on the basis of gender, so we can be somewhat reassured we're not contributing to gender discrimination."
> Why do you think this? All efforts I've seen have been to correct for the discrimination currently occurring in the system.
Because companies often "correct" for discrimination that doesn't exist. At two of the three tech companies I've worked at, these "corrections" took the form of quotas mandating that 33% and 40% of tech hires be women, respectively. Despite the fact that ~20% of software developers and 10% of electrical engineers are women, and those two fields made up the overwhelming majority tech roles at these companies and women were already above industry average representation. This isn't correcting for discrimination. This is mandating 2-3x overrepresentation of women, this is discrimination. It'd be one thing to anonymize resumes, stripping out names, racially identifying details, and otherwise prevent recruiters and interviewers from knowing the race and gender of applicants. I'd be all for that. But that's the opposite of what DEI strives to do.
And how do you know that women are discriminated against? Do you send mock resumes to your recruiters and notice disparities between men and women? Do you anonymize interviews and notice a disparity? I doubt it. As we'll see, you reach the conclusion that women are discriminated against in a very simplistic way.
> I don't. We're still substantially less than 50% of engineering.
Correct, women make up about 20% of tech workers. Thus, a company that has 40% women in tech roles has an overrepresentation of women. Why are you comparing the demographics of a specific field with the general population? If a hospital institutes a policy that 50% of pediatricians be male, that'd be massively discriminatory against women because they make up well over 50% of pediatricians.
You seem to erroneously believe that equal employment opportunity means each job must strive to match the general population. This is incorrect. The benchmark is the demographics of the workforce, not the general population. Don't just trust me, read the law [2]:
"[Affirmative Action] is based on the premise that, absent discrimination, over time a contractor’s workforce generally will reflect the demographics of the qualified available workforce in the relevant job market."
If the workforce for a particular job is 80% women and 20% men and a company has 50% women and 50% men in that role, then that company is going to have a hard time getting Federal contracts because it's probably discriminating against women. Same if the genders were reversed. Equity with respect to the workforce not the general population is what matters.
> If this were true, men would be the minority. Women like money just as much as men do, and would leverage that non-existent favoritism to get those high paying jobs.
Disparity is not evidence of bias. Should the government mandate that women make up 50% of murder convictions? Is this just "correcting" for discrimination? No, that is discrimination. Achieving that quota would involve either convicting innocent women or deliberately letting guilty men go free, because men commit more murder than women. A non-discriminatory justice system doesn't try to achieve a predetermined outcome, it ensures that each defendant is treated equally. Quotas inevitably compromise this equality.
Women make up ~25% of the STEM workforce (software development specifically is a bit lower, around 20%). This directly matches the rate at which they graduate from STEM fields. Which matches the rate at which they say they're interested in STEM in surveys given to high school and middle school [3]. You assume that the only thing that can explain a disparity is bias or discrimination. You totally ignore the fact that women have agency. Sure women like money, but they choose on their own initiative to earn that money in different fields.
Your replies here are excellent in illustrating how DEI is more often than not a dog whistle for gender and racial discrimination. Women are already overrepresented at your company relative to the available workforce ("we're well above industry average in our woman:NB:man ratio"), and you've repeatedly insisted that discriminating on the basis of gender is legal. Your justification for this is that women make up less than 50% of tech workers.
But that's not how anti-discrimination law works. The law requires that applicants are discriminated against on the basis of protected class, not achieving equity with respect to the general population. If 80% of the workforce is one gender, then a non-discriminatory company would probably hire about 80% of said gender. Policies designed to push down representation of that group to bring it more in line with the general population isn't correcting for discrimination, it is actively perpetrating illegal discrimination. And that's what DEI is usually about.
I don't know about the power of appointment there and it's limitations. Regardless, that's still an influence move. It's either trying to influence the existing people in power via threat of unemployment, or influencing potential replacements with a promise of employment.
This is Comcast's publication on the October 2023 leak of customer information. The most relevant section is copy/pasted below:
> What Information Was Involved? On December 6, 2023, we concluded that the information included
usernames and hashed passwords. For some customers, other information was also included, such as
names, contact information, last four digits of social security numbers, dates of birth and/or secret
questions and answers. However, our data analysis is continuing, and we will provide additional notices
as appropriate.
Love it! Have you ever tried Modded Minecraft? Huge fan of the same types of games, and nothing except factorio hits quite as hard as expert packs in Minecraft for me.
Enigmatica 2: Expert Extended, Nomifactory (GTCEu Port), and Gregtech: New Horizons are some of the most engaging factory building games I've ever had the pleasure of playing! Highly recommend giving it a shot if you like that style of puzzle solving :)
Practically speaking, no. It would be huge news in the legal field if some court allowed it, and the decision would certainly be appealed and overturned.
Tangentially, this has been great for Apple to get metrics on Android demand for iMessage. Sure, one can assume every Android user would want access, but instances like this show people are willing to pay for access as well.
Apple should bundle iMessage access for Android into iCloud's subscription and release an official Android app. Maybe some eyes from the DOJ will get that on Apple's roadmap (I can dream, right?).
My devil's advocate for Apple is that iMessage is relatively free of spam because of the exclusive architecture tied to hardware.
The issue isn't so much Beeper as it is the open the door to anyone on the Internet. I.e. Apple probably cares little about Beeper itself, and more about the risk of 3rd party software accessing its services/users.
A good number of us have had to combat spam/abuse in our careers, and we're sympathetic to the plight.
This argument I'm sympathetic to. But I think it would sit a lot better with me if Apple were to produce an Android client. That it's a closed ecosystem doesn't bother me as much as that it's tied to their specific phone hardware.
(I'd still prefer to see 3rd party clients as I appreciate the integration those can bring. But the hardware lock-in is particularly egregious.)
iphones and imessages are incredibly easy to automate for spam. Today's free, grey and dark markets are often powered by real devices as it's easier to maintain than to reverse engineer and replicate. Usually real devices are mixed with automation code for best results (e.g. real devices generate fingerprints and sign stuff while code automates actions).
Creating barrier to entry for spam definitely reduces it but we know for a fact that's not a very effective spam fighting strategy.
I also think modern anti-spam tech is really good. My Samsung phone here is really good at blocking robo calls here in Thailand. In fact I handn't received one since my upgrade to S22. If Samsung can block robo calls and open protocols like federation and email can stop spam through simple tech and volunteer work then multibillion company with some of the best engineers surely can't find this that challenging right? So I find the spam argument for closing off iMessages not very convincing to say the least.
> iphones and imessages are incredibly easy to automate for spam
You lost me here. iMessages in particular are not able to be automated because they always require user input before they’re sent.
There are very few OS processes that have an escalated privilege which allows sending iMessage without user input, but given the lack of widespread iMessage spam vs. SMS spam, it seems those processes aren’t actively being exploited.
Even iPhones in general are actually very hard to automate.
So honestly I have no clue what you’re talking about.
I like the expression, "Your data doesn't exist unless it exists in three places, and at least one of those places should be under your direct control."
Gamestop meme traders deliberately set out to smash the system and they succeeded to a small extent. Robin Hood, in the face of the partners they rely on refusing to allow further acquisitions, did the best they could by still allowing selling.
For any normal trader what happened on one specific day to one specific stock which was deliberately manipulated on a massive scale to try and cause a trading halt is utterly irrelevant.
You do know that besides Robinhood many of the other brokers also halted trading the same tickers? Robinhood was the face of the issue for sure, but a lot of others did the exact same thing.
Most of those 'other brokers' that halted trading, were similar to Robinhood, as in not really a proper brokerage.
No serious bank ever halted trading, why would they?
I know its hard to believe, but the entire customer base (23.3M) of Robinhood is a testament to how good their product is in spite of the misgivings of the brokerage during the "GME". If it makes it feel better, their MAU is down 16% year-over-year to 10.3 million.
I am also a user and I love it - and while I don't trade crypto, but they offer the lowest commission in crypto. And my uninvested cash gets a decent interest (5%), and my trades execute reasonably well. It maybe not for a professional trader, but my own experience has been fantastic for what it offers.
Also incredibly thankful that there is no trading fees across many of the brokers now, which I believe was forced by Robinhood. I know of the PFOF controversy, and regardless I hold this view.
I also know I can't change your view, but hope you have a great weekend ahead!
>Robin Hood, in the face of the partners they rely on refusing to allow further acquisitions, did the best they could by still allowing selling.
You mean Robin Hood manipulated the markets? By only allowing sell orders you manipulated the price and market. In some cases they even automatically sold positions without knowledge of the retail traders.
They should have gone bankrupt, instead they robbed many retail traders.
That’s the wallstreetbets angry meme explanation but not what happened.
What actually happened is brokerages are required to hold capital reserves to cover options held by customers. You can spend a few dollars and your brokerage is required to have sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands in the bank to cover your option.
During peak memestock options activity went to a crazy unprecedented level, Robinhood had to raise billions of dollars in a day or two, like nearly four billion in a few days. And it wasn’t enough so they had to stop trading or put limits on buying options for GameStop and a few others. Etrade and interactive brokers at least also did.
They didn’t go bankrupt or get stomped by regulators or congress because they were behaving within the law and reasonably in an unprecedented situation.
>Gamestop meme traders deliberately set out to smash the system
That is a very strange and biased POV. They did the exact same thing as people have done for years and years, the only difference being this was joined by many people not in the industry.
My understanding was that the whole point of the Gamestop trading was to force financial companies into a position where they were facing insolvency.
I guess it was a hyperbolic to describe it as smashing the system, but the key thing is that the primary purpose was to cause disruption, rather than purely to make a profit. That they became angry when that disruption occurred is a bit baffling to me.
What do you think is wrong with the way they handled the GameStop debacle? They say they run out of cash to fund people buying GameStop on margin. They raised more from investors and opened up buying again. The facts stand up that the whole debacle was a result of their incredibly generous margin facilities. Other (better) trading platforms exist that didn't stop allowing purchases but also didn't give out $1K interest free margin.
> Robinhood restricted trading in these stocks in order to meet collateral requirements at their clearinghouse
> The [class action] case was dismissed by the Miami federal court that November, on the grounds that the plantiffs fell short of providing direct evidence of an antitrust conspiracy
We're currently in discussion with them to see if we can resolve this licensing change to our satisfaction. If not, we'll do the obvious (use a different database) as you said.